Dossia to make health records available to founders' employees

ORLANDO, Fla. According to Dossia chief technology officer David Hammond, the electronic health records consortium is planning to make its Web-based system widely available to employees of its founding members later this year, according to published reports.

Members of Dossia include Wal-Mart, Intel, Cardinal Health, AT&T, Applied Materials, BP America, Pitney Bowes and Sanofi-Aventis.

Hammond said that the consortium also has started trying to entice other employers to join the group. And in the spring, Dossia plans to publish an Application Programming Interface for the system and accelerate its efforts to get health care providers to agree to input the medical records of patients.

He also acknowledged that the health records system “is still in a formative stage.” But he vowed that the technology will work, and claimed that it will improve the ability of patients to manage their own health care by giving them a central storage point for their records, which they then will be able to share with multiple doctors.

The system being built by Dossia “is sort of like a virtual shoe box that you can save all your medical records in and cart around with you,” Hammond said. “We’ve left this [data] in the hands of medical professionals for so long. We need to give some of that control back to [patients].”